


The Schwarzschild Radius

by tripwirealarm



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Introspection, Post Episode: s02e09 The Satan Pit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-23
Updated: 2014-09-23
Packaged: 2018-02-18 13:29:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2350067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tripwirealarm/pseuds/tripwirealarm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor, Rose, a black hole, and things better left unsaid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Schwarzschild Radius

It’s a kind of silence that devours.

It’s not the quiet before a storm; it _is_ the storm.  A bellowing silence that swallows even the ambient sounds of the TARDIS interior behind them, every whir and hum and electronic pulse has dwindled to hide behind it  like something massive but invisible, a suffocating avalanche of airless shadow, something that bends light and time with its impossible weight.  It’s silence like a volcanic blast, a din, a clamor; it shakes their bones in their sediment of flesh.  It drowns out everything within its reach, even the sound of breath.  Everything becomes distant, like the static-sounding hush heard in a seashell.   
  
Rose had wanted a last look at it, the black hole and what remained of its--maybe not impossible but highly improbable--planet.  It’s a kind of cosmic flickershow, a fever dream shifting in distant parallax.  A slow-motion pinwheel of gas and flame, studded with detritus, with brightness and dark like pearls of rain on a window.  It’s a kind of thing that feels wrong to the eye; in any body he’d have found himself squinting.

This quiet, it seems, in light of the day it’s been--it’s a little much for the Doctor to stand.  He speaks because, in this body, there is something about silence that unnerves him, sends his cells into an uneasy, electric grind.  He wants to fill that empty space with color and light, friction and words and sound because when it’s quiet, all he can hear is the grinding in his head: postulates and numbers and vectors, the perpetual motion machine of his own thoughts.

“The sense of movement,” he tells her, softly, raising a hand to point out the open doors, “is a bit of a trick of the eye.  You’re seeing the last remains of the Scarlet System, but once the debris reaches beyond the Schwarzschild radius, the motion is only from the drift, your changing perspective along the velocity curve in relation to radial distance from galactic center.”

Her shoulders give an appreciative little bounce, a tiny tremor of fond but tense laughter that inexplicably makes his stomach roll inside him.  “Beyond the what?”

He’s lived so long and managed, in some ways, to learn so little.  This is to say nothing about declarative memory, about percentage of recall, facts and figures in context of any situation that might require his attention at any given time, no.  His memory, semantic and episodic, like most of his ilk, is and has always been close to polished-perfect.  Some personal coloring to events notwithstanding, he knows more than most cultures will collectively forget over the epochs.

But not everything one learns is knowledge, and he’s become increasingly aware of an incredible dearth in his wisdom ever since he welcomed Rose Tyler on board. 

He can calculate the theoretical motions of three-manifold comoving spacetime as circumlocational aspects in his head.  He’s doodled open-timelike curve models disproving the Penrose cosmic censorship hypothesis on cocktail napkins.  His solution for cosmological inflation accounts for the lack of large-scale discontinuities in the electroweak vacuum.  He knows the non-spherically symmetric gravitational model for dark flow, easy prime decomposition solutions for the Poincaré dodecahedral space, the true granularity equation that makes loop quantum gravity possible.  He is an intellect the size of a galaxy housed in a soft, temporary shell, but he cannot keep his own blood pressure from rising when Rose Tyler from 21st century London licks along the side of a melting ice lolly, and even more confounding, he doesn’t fully understand why.

It is an enormous, frustrating problem to which he, embarrassingly, has yet no solution.  Lately, every time he finds himself distracted, eyes wandering to places they have no business lingering or thoughts drifting in twisted directions they haven’t gone in literal centuries, he feels his own skin grow hot with a surreal, puzzled humiliation. 

And today--inversely--he’d gone cold.  Cold as a tomb, empty, echoing, filled with shadow and remorse.  Standing at the bottom of a hole just deep enough to bury the very idea of maleficence, just for a moment, there had been the unthinkable notion of sacrificing her for what would be, no doubt, the greater good of everything in existence.

He’s had enough of that kind of sacrifice for more lifetimes than he’ll ever be allowed.  Whether that’s noble or selfish, he can’t decide and doesn’t care in either case. 

Any mild protests he’s raised about her safety at any point have been generally hand waved.  She’s said it more than once now: it’s been her choice to travel with him.  He can’t be blamed for the places the TARDIS brings them at random or the dangers that exist there.  He wants that to be true, but in a lot of ways, it isn’t.  Just in the past few weeks he’d lost her Mickey, then he’d lost her her face for a day, and this time he’d almost lost her her life.  What he’ll almost lose her tomorrow or the next day, he can’t bring himself to hypothesize. 

To Rose, he replies, “The Schwarzschild radius.  The radius of a sphere wherein if all its mass is concentrated inside that sphere, the escape speed from the surface would equal the speed of light.  On the sanctuary base we were geostationary, that’s the first clue, so that black hole is non-rotating.”  He shifts his weight to his heels, hands in and then back out of his pockets, intending to gesture with them but instead reaching for hers in what has become an ill-advised but irresistible habit.  “Its mass is so great that it is actually smaller than its own Schwarzschild radius, which creates an event horizon beyond which events cannot reach an observer.  It only proves that whatever it is about that little rock, it’s got a mass that can rival a black hole at its barycenter--that’s the only way orbit could conceivably have been achieved.”

With her hand in his, no matter what his mouth is going on about--about orbit and gravity and inescapable attraction--there’s a secret that exists in the space between them.  It’s a secret embodied by the way he sometimes he wakes up from a dead sleep, achy and strange in his own body with images of Rose fresh from being conjured in his sleeping mind, nerve endings humming like a live wire arcing electricity with nowhere to feed it. 

At first he'd loved her like a new landscape, later like a beautiful song, and then something closer.  More intimate.  A security blanket, a favorite poem, like the first taste of sugar, a cocktail, a recreational drug. Something that goes in your mouth; something that ends up in your blood. 

Now she’s a shiver, an itch; she’s a sneeze. She’s something that wrests control of his body away from him.  Like sliding downward with the pull of gravity, slipping down a hole or a well, already too deep to climb back out.  A place with no footholds, only a straight slope upward that he’d gladly slid down without any regard to escape. 

He doesn’t remember the first time it occurred to him, or at least, the first time it had taken the form of a fully realized, coherent thought and not a half-swallowed impulse, a puff of smoke in his mind to wave away.  Perhaps it was one of those times he would find himself thinking a bit too intently about that hard-mouthed kiss on New Earth for reasons he can’t quite pinpoint.  Sometimes he runs it through his memory obsessively like it’s some kind of unsolved problem, like he’s seeking out integer diophantine quintuples or a single solution to the Fermat-Catalan conjecture, but with the added, anxious discomfort of cold sweat rolling down his spine.

Even now, with her eyes sad and downcast and his neurochemical crisis cocktail still inching down to normal levels, he’s reminding himself that he’s not an animal. There is a primitive itch in his brain, begging him to touch, but the Doctor doesn’t need to use his body to feel alive.  He doesn’t require superfluous sensory information to validate indisputable certainty.  He doesn’t need to taste her, to feel her heat.  He doesn’t need haptic confirmation just to be sure she’s still here. 

There’s a mental image this conjures on reflex, something that makes him feel like a pitiful beast gripped in hormone sweats. The shame that follows is reflexive, something he’s created in his mind, the voice of reason and laudable sophistication as taught in the societal identity he’s still dragging around behind him like a bottomless shadow. He swallows it all back, all the heat and aching, like drinking down a quasar and holding it all in his gut. It presses the breath from his lungs, makes a desert of his throat. The Doctor contains multitudes: fact, regrets, whispers of soul-twisting perversion.

“It could be said,” he tells her after long minutes of, in light of the situation, generally companionable silence, “that what you’re seeing of the black hole, the debris and gas and all, it’s not really there.”

“Doctor,” she whispers, and her eyes are still cast out into the wobbling heat-mirage of the event horizon, bending light and time while she leans into him, the weight of her head against his collarbone.   “D’you think he’d have lived?  Toby, I mean.  If that thing had let him go...or if I’d just waited--”

Standing this close, he can feel the warmth that rolls off of her, even in the frigid creep of the declining temperature from the doorway standing open into deep space.  It’s chemical reactions, her metabolism burning food and oxygen, converting it to energy, a breathing, brilliant testament to the magnificence of humanity and life, and she almost lost that today.  He almost lost it.  Despite himself, he wants to feel that heat against the chill of his own body, undeniable visceral evidence that she’s still here.  That whatever it was hiding deep below the surface, something harboring its own gravitational mass enough to balance out the weight of a dying sun--it had looked into his mind and fished out the most fragile, denied fear it could find, and spoken it aloud along with his most tender, throbbing regret.  It wasn’t Rose it bad been hoping to disturb with its predictions. 

“Sometimes...you have to choose something terrible if the alternative is something worse.  There’s not always time to find a better way.  Besides, there’s no telling how much of Toby there really was left, Rose.  You had to decide.  That’s not your fault.”

“The lesser of two evils, yeah?”

The Doctor surprises himself by laughing: a helpless, panting sound.  “I’d hoped to avoid putting it quite that way.”

She twists, turning inward so her cheek rolls against the lapel of his jacket, features arranged with the silent, picturesque sadness of a Greek statue, too unique for a goddess.  Goddesses are generic, dime a dozen--mere personifications of the fantastic mundane while hers is the face of a muse, a grace, one of the fates tying lives together with red strings, linking them inextricably.  Something that bends nature to her will, manifesting herself throughout time and space for reasons too human to be the heartless divine. 

He wonders when it was that Rose became this marble-eyed, forward-looking traveler, accustomed to the profound emptiness of the deep sky, shaken loose from the false linearity of existence and living her allotted lifetime in a haphazard scattering of close calls and triumphs on worlds so far removed from a council estate in southern London she once could have scarcely imagined their existence.  Now he's the one being half-awestruck daily by things he once could never have pictured--some breath stealing epiphanies, others long-sleeping devils waking in the deep, lightless pit of his own heart.

“Never did try Protein 2,” she says softly, matter-of-fact, and then laughs. 

He laughs with her, more than is really warranted, their giggling fueled by relief and the tail end of their collective adrenaline jag. 

It’s between two elongated gusts of exhausted laughter that he feels himself inclining forward, moving toward her without thought, just with the smooth tow-line of gravity, his body and his thoughts and his mouth drawn inevitably forward towards the event horizon of Rose Tyler because he wants to catch that laugh in his mouth, he wants to see if it tastes as sweet as it sounds, he wants to feel the impact he knows is waiting there like meteors hitting the Earth, like steel rain and comets and continents breaking apart, torn asunder by the weight and mass, inertia and velocity.  He wants to be devoured.

“So if light can’t escape,” she says brightly, her shift in tone more than a bit put-on and her attention once more directly toward the dark lesion of the black hole.  “Why can I see anything at all?”

Cosmological physics and his imagined cataclysmic impacts aside, her question has stilled him.  It’s an unfortunate side effect of his increasing preoccupation that sometimes he can’t see anything except her and he’s certain he should be ashamed of himself, but he’s not.  It’s like looking directly at a sun, burning on his retinas, leaving a scar so that he’ll see it even when his eyes are closed, like something imprisoned on the edge of a Schwarzschild radius--its image lingering long after it has expired. 

“Because there are multiple sources,” he tells her, pausing to lift a hand again and gesture vaguely out the door in a motion that feels repetitive and almost helpless, his fingers skimming the floating edges of her hair that crown her like a halo in a religious painting, like luminous gas and dust churning around a galactic center.  A smile stretches over her face in his peripheral, bright and wide, celestial enough that stars could be born inside it.  It makes the space around him draw tight, contracting, pulling in from all sides and he feels ironically claustrophobic standing here with her at the rim of forever with his double-pulse misfiring like a dirty motor. 

“What your eyes perceive are wavelengths of light from external sources.  That’s how optics works, interpretation of light particles reflected off of objects and back to your eyes, cones and rods determine color and value, and all that is sent back through your optic nerve and into your brain, where it creates a picture.  But the gravity at the center is too strong...”  He’s not answering her question anymore, it’s just his tongue running, filling that unsettling silence with an explanatory monologue to take the place of the things he knows he should say--wants to say--but won’t.   Words are just sounds, they dwindle and fade, just reverberations reliant on matter to travel; they can’t capture true enormity even when they try, all they can do is follow where great things have been.  They will do him little service now.  “It’s too strong, and past a certain point, light would have to travel faster than it physically is able to escape and reach your eyes.  So, past a certain point, the light that reflects on the events that happen beyond that point cannot be observed, and because time slows approaching objects of great mass, you just see the last position of everything lost into the hole.  Frozen at its edge, with time at a standstill, and no light to transmit the fate of anything that crosses that threshold.”

He knows all about that, about being frozen in time, about unobservable fates.  About thresholds that cannot be uncrossed.  About two bodies in a precarious dance, their counterweights and symmetries just enough to obtain a delicate balance when all conceivable models of probability dictate that one would certainly consume the other.  One, a tiny, brave little rock of an extrasolar body, far from its home, more an asteroid than a planet, hanging on with all its might, and the other the most destructive force of nature possible, locked in its own perpetual death rattle--against all logic, caught in each other’s orbit. 

 It would have been easy to think of himself as that force of nature before he knew how gravity could translate to the world of breath and fingertips.  He likes it, he hates it.  It’s a controlled descent at terminal velocity, the blood tumbling through his veins as heavy as liquid iron, standing still at a hundred and eighty six thousand miles per second.  Her fingers braid wordlessly through his and perspective is never far away, them standing on the edge with the universe sprawled at their feet.  It’s not a question of  _what_  will happen, but  _when_. 

 One will be consumed, and the other will be left alone in the soundless, interstellar dark.  There’s no question which role he’ll play in the end. 


End file.
